Apple breaking the PR mold for Apple Watch

“Apple PR is legendary for creating excitement and desire around new tech products. Their approach has evolved and expanded for Apple Watch in order to reach separate style-conscious and mainstream audiences, both largely disconnected from tech,” Steven Isakson writes for Seeking Alpha. “This will make Apple Watch a massive consumer product.”

“Apple has broadened its Watch PR to mainstream outlets, placing pre-release Watches with news and business publications having an audience for high-end products,” Isakson writes. “At four of the top ten, tech is only an occasional focus – USA Today, New York Times, Bloomberg Business and the Wall Street Journal… Also unique to Apple Watch, the international reviewers included Australian watch maven Bani McSpedden. His web site has video reviews titled “A minute with…” featuring timepieces like the Bethune DB25 White Night, a Swiss watch that retails for $60,000. Ahead of the reviews, Apple invited ABC News into their top-secret fitness research lab for a segment that aired on the evening news and Good Morning America. Totally unprecedented for a company where secrecy is Job #1.”

“The very reticent Jony Ive has given several major interviews in the last year, starting with the March 17, 2014 profile in Time magazine. None were tech publications. Vogue and the Vanity Fair Summit followed that fall, then this year Ive was interviewed by the New Yorker and the ‘How to Spend It’ section of the Financial Times,” Isakson writes. “Apple is playing a long game here. They are not only embedding the idea of wrist-worn technology into our global culture, they are making it stylish and cool. By appealing to a full range of consumers and accessing both traditional watch and new wearable computing markets, Apple has entered a product category that will allow it again to overcome the law of large numbers.”

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I admire Apple’s forethought in bringing significant new funtionality in the world of mobile devices to consumers in an engaging and upscale way, rather than the world of $100-$200 throw-away Google-ish gadgets that last mere months.

Apple is thus looking to the long term view for what products will “last.”

It would be nice if there were a long-term plan mentioned by Apple such as if the guts can be upgraded in the future or how many iterations the bands will work with. I realize this may be difficult, but when there is a premium paid for the device, it would be nice to know our investment will last for several years and not just the 1 or 2 that is typical for electronics.